96
PARTISAN REVIEW
theses, religious in inspiration, of the nineteenth century, such as Dos–
toyevsky's dialogism, which shattered the believer's virtue by dint of id–
IOcy.
One might well ask if France has not preeminently continued to be
the area of culture - in the sense of Hegel's "perversion"; one might ask
if it has not identified with culture, and if culture, defined in such a
manner, is not definitively French.... When the perverseness of values
establishes the subtle norm of a culture conscious of its reversibilities, one
could not insist in assuming all by oneself the univalent role of the
For–
eigner,
whether it be positive (a revealer of the tribe's hidden significance)
or negative (an intruder who destroys the consensus). The romantic or
terroristic seriousness of strangeness in itself becomes dissolved in this glit–
tering polymorphic culture that returns everyone to his or her otherness
or foreign status. Nor does such a culture, however, assimilate foreigners;
it dissolves their very being as it dissolves the clear-cut boundaries be–
tween same and others. Alas, it does not always withstand the dogmatic
attempts of those - economically or ideologically disappointed - who
restore their "ownness" and "identity" by rejecting others. The fact re–
mains nonetheless that in France such attempts are immediately and more
than elsewhere seen as a betrayal of
culture,
as a loss of
spirit.
And even if,
at certain times in history, such a healthy cultural reaction tends to be
forgotten, one feels like counting on it so as to maintain France as a
land of asylum. Not as a house of welcome but as a ground for adven–
ture. There are foreigners who wish to be lost in the perverseness of
French culture in order to be reborn not with a new identity but within
the enigmatic dimension of human experience that, with and beyond
belonging, is called freedom. In French: culture .
During the meetings of the National Assembly between August 20
and August 26, 1789, the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
was
debated and adopted. Two centuries later, it remains the yet unsurpassed
touchstone for those freedoms to be enjoyed by any human being on
our planet. One has often admired the conciseness and lucidity of a text
that succeeds within a few pages to foresee abuses and threats, and to
guarantee the reasoned exercise of freedoms, drawn up in order to affect
the existing political institutions, to modify them so that they might
show respect for "simple and indisputable principles." Consequently, bas–
ing itself on a universal human nature that the Enlightenment learned to
conceive and to respect, the
Declaration
shifts from the universal notion -
"men" - to the "political associations" that must preserve their rights,
and encounters the historical reality of the "essential political associa–
tion," which turns out to be the
nation .
The national political body
